Betty Edwards found a way to let almost anyone learn to draw
-- specifically, anyone with average eyesight and average eye-hand coordination,
anyone who can thread a needle or catch a baseball. Drawing realistically
requires shifting to a different way of seeing, seeing the way experienced
artists see when they are working.

"The key to learning to draw, therefore, is to set
up conditions that cause you to make a mental shift to a different
mode of information processing -- the slightly altered state of consciousness
-- that enables you to see well. In this drawing mode you will be
able to draw your perceptions even though you may never have studied drawing.
Once the drawing mode is familiar to you, you will be able to consciously
control the mental shift." -- Drawing on the Right Side
of the Brain

In the "Preface" of the First Edition of Drawing on
the Right Side of the Brain, published in 1979, Dr. Edwards wrote:
"... when I started teaching, I tried to communicate my way of thinking
about drawing to my students. It didn't work very well, and, to my distress,
out of a class of thirty or so students only a few learned to draw." For
over a decade she worked on this problem: "how to enable all the
students in a class instead of just a few to learn the skill of drawing."
The book presents a sequence of drawing exercises designed to do that --
to guide the reader to "develop a new way of seeing by tapping the special
functions of the right hemisphere...."

Her first preface tells the story of how she made this
discovery, beginning when she first noticed that drawing involved a special
way of seeing: "I can still remember saying to myself, even as a
young child, that if I wanted to draw something, I had to do 'that.' I
never defined 'that,' but I was aware of having to gaze at whatever
I wanted to draw for a time until 'that' occurred. Then I could draw with
a fairly high degree of skill for a child."

She loved being praised for her "special gift," and was
in danger of believing that she did have a rare natural talent. "But in
the back of my mind, I felt that [the praise] was misplaced. I knew that
drawing was easy and that all anyone had to do was to look at things in
that certain way."

When she began teaching, she found that communicating
her way of thinking about drawing to students wasn't going to be easy,
and she started trying find a way. "I began to look inward, observing myself
while drawing, trying to find out what I was doing when I experienced that
different kind of seeing. I also began to ask questions of the students.
One thing I noticed was that the few students who did learn to draw didn't
improve gradually -- they improved dramatically. One week they would
still be fumbling with stereotypic, childlike images. The next week, suddenly
they could draw well."

When she asked them what they were doing differently,
the successful students typically said that they were "just looking
at things." None of them could describe specifically how their way of looking
had changed.

Her next clue was something she noticed when she was demonstrating
drawing to a class, and trying to give a verbal explanation of the methods
she was using. She found that she often would "simply stop talking right
in the middle of a sentence. I would hear my voice stop and I would think
about getting back to the sentence, but finding the words again would seem
like a terrible chore -- and I didn't really want to anyhow. But pulling
myself back at last, I would resume talking -- and then find that I had
lost contact with the drawing, which suddenly seemed confusing and difficult.
Thus I picked up a new bit of information: I could either talk or draw,
but I couldn't do both at once."

Later, she gradually discovered the exercises that are
recommended in her books. For example, one day she told the students to
copy an upside-down image of a drawing by a master. "To our great surprise
(mine and the students'), the drawings were excellent. This didn't
make sense to me. The lines, after all, are the same lines, whether right-side-up
or upside-down."

Another discovery: Students could make more realistic
drawings by trying to draw the spaces around the forms they were
working with, rather than trying to draw the forms themselves. This was
also another puzzle: "Why should looking at spaces produce good drawings
of forms?"

Eventually it all fit together when she was studying the
work of Roger Sperry and his colleagues, studies which showed that two
sides of the brain make very different contributions to human cognition.
She realized that seeing the way experienced artists see when they are
working required shifting from the left hemisphere's verbal / analytic
mode of processing to the global / spatial mode of the right hemisphere.

Why, she asks, can't people see things clearly
enough to draw them?

A part of the answer is that, from childhood
onward, we have learned to see things in terms of words: we name things,
and we know facts about them. The dominant left verbal hemisphere doesn't
want too much information about things it perceives -- just enough to recognize
and to categorize. The left brain, in this sense, learns to take a quick
look and says, "Right, that's a chair ...." Because the brain is
overloaded most of the time with incoming information, it seems that one
of its functions is to screen out a large proportion of incoming perceptions.
This is a necessary process to enable us to focus our thinking and one
that works very well for us most of the time. But drawing requires
that you look at something for a long time, perceiving lots of details,
registering as much information as possible -- ideally, everything....

The left hemisphere has no patience with this detailed
perception, and says, in effect, "It's a chair, I tell you. That's enough
to know...."

* * *

[A]dult students beginning in art generally do not really
see what is in front of their eyes -- that is, they do not perceive
in the special way required for drawing. They take note of what's there,
and quickly translate the perception into words and symbols mainly based
on the symbol system developed throughout childhood and on what they know
about the perceived object. (Drawing on the Left Side of the Brain,
pp. 77,78)

She discovered that the most efficient way to switch from
the dominant left hemisphere 's mode of verbal categorizing to the right
hemisphere's interest in visual details is to "present the brain with
a task the left brain either can't or won't handle."

She went on to develop a comprehensive training program
that lets students learn how to intentionally enter the right-brain mode
of perception. Her method of drawing training is presented in her books,
in classes given by people who have completed her
teacher training program, and in workshops she
gives around the world.

The sequel, Drawing on the Artist Within,
expands on the techniques presented in DLSB, "using the visual language
of drawing to unlock the full creative potential of the human unconscious
and apply that power to everyday problems."

"Dr. Betty Edwards is a world renowned educator in the
field of art.... Her work has reached well over 3,000,000 people, world
wide. Both books have been translated into over twelve languages and are
used as text books in schools and colleges nationally and internationally.

"She has presented over five-hundred workshops, seminars
and lectures for public schools, art associations, university students,
technical and scientific staffs and corporate groups. She has presented
seminars in creative problem solving to corporations such as : The Walt
Disney Company, Digital Equipment Corporation, Apple Computer Company,
IBM, Polaroid, AT&T Bell Labs, American Advertising Associations, Saatchi
& Saatchi, GE, American Dental Association, and the American Institute
of Architecture.

"Dr. Edwards is Professor Emeritus, California
State University, Long Beach. She continues as the Director of the
Center for the Educational Applications of Brain Hemisphere Research at
CSULB. Through her books, workshops and seminars Betty Edwards continues
to make a huge impact upon the fields of art education and Creative Problem-
Solving." -- from a description of a tutorial
Dr. Edwards gave on her method in 1997.

At the amazon.com page for these book one finds unanimous
acclaim from the reader reviewers: five stars from each reader who contributed
a review. Most books reviewed get a mix of ratings -- some folks loved
it, some didn't. Everyone who bothered to submit a review for either of
these books by Betty Edwards (21 as of this writing) loved the book.

"We live in a time when only a few gifted and dedicated
teams of designers can produce buildings that approach the beauty of these
that eighteenth-century carpenters created all by themselves. What went
wrong?"

"In The Old Way of Seeing, Hale shows us how we can recover
a sense of the basics - light, shadow, and proportion - in our buildings
and how we can begin to repair the damage that has been done to our visual
environment."